A FEW IN MANY PLACES IN ISTANBUL

May 8 - August 8, 2021
Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul, New York, Santurce, Guatemala City

Co-curated by Mari Spirito and Abhijan Toto, A Few In Many Places includes collaborators: 

Gahee Park, Gim Ikhyun, Miji Lee, Welcome to Ogasawara (Hyun Woomin, Min Guhong Manufacturing, Park Daham, Yuri An, Yun Choi), Komtouch Dew Napattaloong, Thanart Rasanon, Alper Turan, Zeynep Kayan, Kathryn Hamilton, Deniz Tortum, Lila Nazemian, Vartan Avakian, Kristine Khouri, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, Embajada, Taller Comunidad La Goyco, Jorge González Santos, Esvin Alarcón Lam, Antonio Pichillá, Camilla Juárez.

PROTOZINE: A Few in Many Places 2021 

View online & download PDF

A Few In Many Places in Istanbul: 
Zeynep Kayan, Kathryn Hamilton, Deniz Tortum, Mari Spirito, Alper Turan

Dates: May 24-June 21, 2021 
Visiting Hours: Mon-Fri, 11:00-17:00
Venue: Kıraathane İstanbul Edebiyat Evi
Asmalı Mescid Mah., Yemenici Abdüllatif Sk., 1. Beyoğlu, 34430 İstanbul, +90 212 2529389

Public Programs: Who are a few in many places? Online conversation between collaborators. 
May 28 2021, 19:00, GMT+03 

Protocinema presents A Few In Many Places, a multi-city group exhibition that addresses on-going collapses and cycles of violence, through various forms of collectivity. Taking place in Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul, New York, Santurce, and Guatemala City, all of these interventions use sustainable exhibition-making models of reducing exploitation (of natural resources, labor, and knowledge) and consumption (no shipping or flying). This year, collaborators present works on continuing inequalities happening in both physical and digital realms. Developed by Protocinema in 2020, A Few In Many Places maintains a foot in physical real-life, small, and safe get-togethers in each community while utilizing far-reaching digital support structures, to be both hyper-local and globally interconnected. Each chapter is site-responsive while speaking across the regions and produced in a format that allows for forms of engagement under various conditions of lockdowns or other contingent situations. 

A Few In Many Places in Bangkok, Istanbul, and New York will focus on the image in its myriad forms as a site of collective investigation and re-learning as well as a tool to unhinge the cycles of violence. In Istanbul the exhibition takes vision, body, and movement as subject-matters, and as sensory metaphors of cycles, re-cycles, to understand how to potentially break those cycles. Zeynep Kayan, with her video works using her body, replays endless repetitions of small physical movements, recalling somatic knowledge, which our bodies carry and transmit for generations. ARK, an ongoing collaborative work by Kathryn Hamilton and Deniz Tortum explores the ways that contemporary technologies have provided the framework for understanding the relationship between the body and the world.        

Zeynep Kayan, from one one two one two three series (still), 2021, video. Courtesy Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul | Berlin and Protocinema, Istanbul | New York

Zeynep Kayan, from one one two one two three series, An attempt to read from Thomas Bernhard (still), 2021, video. Courtesy Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul | Berlin and Protocinema, Istanbul| New York

Zeynep Kayan’s works explore the self, body, and human condition by studying and employing repetition as an essential instrument via variations of a single image, a movement, a gesture, a sound, or a line of words to create rhythm and tempo, for the emergence of meaning. ‘‘How repetition renders words and acts familiar as if only to make them feel foreign again?’’ is the pivotal question. There is the desire to repeat and the repeat to desire. As the artist adopts a time-based, choreographic approach in her process of image-making to explore the possibilities of movements -sometimes repeating words, at times hitting on the wall with her arms, multiplying the acts, multiplying the present moment- she uses the video camera/photo booth as a mirror for creating images of her "body" which is a figure that perpetually interacts with the surroundings. In her video, titled An attempt to read from Thomas Bernhard (2021), Kayan starts reciting a sentence from Bernhard’s Walking, but she cannot carry it out until the end without constantly going back to the beginning of the sentence, continue adding up to it and she tries to carry the water from one place to the other and starts to do it all over again. The ever-finished sentence says: ‘‘We have to continue what we aimed to start, while we are conscious that nothing is ever certain and nothing ever has integrity. If we keep giving up before we start, we would not get rid of disappointment and we would get lost in the end.’’  

Kathryn Hamilton & Deniz Tortum, ARK project (stills), 2021, video

As Zeynep Kayan explores corporal inherited knowledge, represented here by physical repetitions, ARK, an ongoing collaborative work by Kathryn Hamilton and Deniz Tortum look at perceptual knowledge which originates from external worlds and their simulations. 

The second project of ARK tracks the parallelisms of histories of computation and climate crisis, and invites the viewers to enter into the structure of perception via a room-size camera-obscura, a reinvention of a human eyeball. Receiving sensory information and perception of the data have been altering with the technologies such as VR that become commercially accessible and used by a myriad industry is the initial question of ARK. While these computing technologies aim for securing the perfect mimesis of the outside world, the outside world in the era of Anthropocene which is being altered and lost as a result of a chain of human action. Hamilton and Tortum juxtapose VR and camera obscura and merge these two technologies together to create a trans-temporal simulation set-up in order to question the validity and popularity of contemporary simulation theories that suggest everything around us is already a simulation and that’s why there is no need to take any action. Besides inviting the viewer to experience the simulation within, they also include non-human living organisms which are frighteningly living and growing in this simulation.

A Few In Many Places is accompanied by a new edition of ProtoZine, with commissioned texts from a range of different perspectives by the curatorial group Collective Rewilding (Sara Garzón, Ameli Klein, and Sabina Oroshi), philosopher Erik Bordeleau and a collaborative essay connecting two city interventions (Santurce and Istanbul) and five collaborators Kathryn Hamilton / Deniz Tortum, Zeynep Kayan, Jorge González, Mari Spirito. 

Zeynep Kayan’s artistic practice explores the repetitive structural setup of the variations she creates in photography, video and sound pieces, mostly in relation to portraiture and performance. Kayan graduated from the Communication and Design Department of Bilkent University in Ankara and got her MA degree in Fine Arts Department of MaHKU in Utrecht, Netherlands. Her shows include Temporary Sameness (Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul, 2019); Working on it (Helsinki Contemporary Art Gallery, Helsinki, 2020); Concealed (Kasa Gallery, Istanbul, 2018); Until Finding the Source of the Water (performance with Özgür Atlagan, RijksOpen, Amsterdam, 2019 & SALT Galata, Istanbul, 2018). Kayan is represented by Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul | Berlin.

Kathryn Hamilton aka Sister Sylvester is an artist and self-taught microbiologist. She is a current resident at ONX Studio, a new media workspace created by the Onassis foundation and The New Museum in NYC; a 2019 Macdowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater Devised Theater Working Group, and Public Theater New Works program. Recent performances include The Eagle and The Tortoise, National Sawdust, NYC; The Fall, Yale University, and Under The Radar, NYC; Three Rooms, Shubbak Festival/Arcola, London; Bozar, Brussels; Frascati, Amsterdam; Recent video work has shown at MoCA Toronto, 601Artspace NYC, MUTEK festival and Humboldt University, Berlin. Hamilton spent the years 2011-13 in disguise as a French diplomat in New York.

Deniz Tortum (b. 1989) works in film and new media. His work has screened internationally, including at the Venice Film Festival, IFFR, SxSW, Sheffield, True/False and Dokufest. He has worked as a research assistant at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where his research focused on virtual reality. In 2017-18, Tortum was a fellow at Harvard Film Study Center, working on Phases of Matter, which premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2020 and received the Best Documentary awards at Istanbul and Antalya Film Festivals. His film If Only There Were Peace (co-dir Carmine Grimaldi) received the best short documentary award at Dokufest and his latest VR film Floodplain premiered in Venice Film Festival. He was recently featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Mari Spirito is the Executive Director and Curator of Protocinema, a cross-cultural, site-aware art organization commissioning and presenting exhibitions and public programs in Istanbul and New York, since 2011. From 2013-1818 Spirito programed Conversations for both Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach; served as International Advisory Committee Member for the Inaugural High Line Plinth Commissions, New York, 2017; was Curator and Director of Alt Art Space, Bomonti, Istanbul, 2015-17; Advisor to the 2nd Mardin Biennial, Turkey, 2012; and Director of 303 Gallery New York, 2000-12. Spirito is on the Board of Participant, Inc, New York, and holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. 

Alper Turan is a curator and researcher based in Istanbul and Berlin. Her current research and curatorial practice focus on queer strategies and methodologies. Between 2016-18, he was the co-founder of a curatorial collective Das Art Project. Recent exhibitions include A Finger for an Eye, as a part of Protocinema Emerging Curators Series, Istanbul (2021), HIVStories: Living Politics (co-curated with EUROPACH) , Schwules Museum, Berlin, Biennale Warszawa,Warsaw, Dramaqueer, Istanbul (2019-20); Queer Appropriation, Cité internationale des Arts, Paris (2020), Positive Space, Operation Room, Istanbul (2018-19). Turan is a PhD student in theory and history of arts at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg (HFBK); works as curator for the Slavs and Tatars Studio, and Cultural Manager and Curator for Protocinema.

For other city interventions, Seoul, Bangkok, New York, Santurce, Guatemala City

Press Inquiries: Alper Turan, alper@protocinema.org, +49 17670518587, +90 5068706808 

Protocinema is a cross-cultural, mission-driven art organization, commissioning and presenting site-aware art in Istanbul, New York, and elsewhere. We produce context-specific projects of the highest artistic quality that are accessible to everyone. Protocinema evokes empathy towards an understanding of difference, across regions through exhibitions, educational public programming, and mentorship. Protocinema maintains long-term relationships with artists nurturing sustained growth. Founded by Mari Spirito in 2011, Protocinema is a registered 501(c)3, free of 'brick and mortar', sites vary to respond both to global concerns and changing conditions on the ground. protocinema.org 

Supporters 

Protocinema is supported by FfAI - The Foundation for Arts Initiatives; The Cowles Charitable Trust, New Jersey; 601 Artspace, New York; American Chai Trust, New York; Hagop Kevorkian Center, NYU, New York, Goethe Institut, Bangkok; Art Council Korea;  Gallery VER, Bangkok; Estrellita Brodsky

Sua-ty (Canción de Sol) is made possible by Para La Naturaleza, La Reserva Guatoc, Estrellita B. Brodsky, Yola Colon, Michy Marxuach, Ernesto Pujol, Ismael Colón, Enrique Bayoán Ríos Escribano, and friends of the artist and Embajada.

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